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Irish People Are Officially A Happy Bunch

It’s official: Irish people are very satisfied with their lives, according to a new survey. Despite all the troubles life can throw at us, it seems us Irish are an impressively upbeat bunch of people, who are happy with life. The findings were compiled in an interesting once-off research project into measuring wellbeing of the Irish people by the Central Statistics Office.

According to the Irish Times, a Central Statistics Office (CSO) survey on wellbeing shows more than three-quarters of the population ranked their overall satisfaction with life as “high” or “very high”. When asked about day-to-day emotions, a similar proportion rated their happiness the previous day as “very high” or “high”.

Four out of every five adults were asked to rank whether they viewed the things they did as worthwhile gave themselves a high rating. Those aged between 16 and 19, and aged 60-plus, reported the highest overall ratings of happiness. It’s really uplifting to see that so many are happy in their day-to-day lives, as it’s the little things day-to-day, which make up the bigger things in life.

We are almost the happiest bunch of the lot. We have around the same level of happiness as our UK neighbours, while here in the Republic of Ireland and the North had the highest ratings for happiness. Yay. Ireland had the second highest rating for how worthwhile people felt their lives were.

However, it’s of course not all smiles for everyone, as 15 percent of the population reported experiencing a high level of anxiety the previous day. More than a quarter of all females rated their anxiety as “medium” or “high”.

Your working life also counts as a big thing on the happiness spectrum, as the jobless were also likely to be unhappier with their lives than the rest of the population. Nearly one in three unemployed people rated their “happiness yesterday” as medium or lower, compared with only one in five employed people.

And we also had the highest percentage of people who felt low or anxious the previous day, according to the survey.

Are you surprised by the results that Irish are primarily a happy bunch?